Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Henry Lewes

Lewes is aiming his knife at a very particular human failing: not ignorance, but acclimation. The line doesn’t mourn that people lack access to “marvels”; it accuses them of living inside the miraculous and still managing to make it dull. “Ordinary men” isn’t just a demographic label so much as a psychological type: the person who lets habit do their seeing for them. The verb choices matter. “Live among” suggests proximity without participation, like existing in a museum you’ve stopped looking at. “Feel no wonder” makes wonder an affective skill, not a lucky accident. It can be lost, or trained out of you.

The second clause tightens the screw. Familiarity doesn’t merely reduce awe; it blocks learning. “Grow familiar” is passive, almost organic, as if numbness is the default setting. “Learn nothing new” lands harder because it rejects the comforting idea that time naturally brings insight. Lewes implies the opposite: time can be an anesthetic. The subtext is a critique of complacent empiricism - the mind that thinks it’s being practical while it’s actually refusing to notice.

Contextually, this fits a mid-19th-century intellectual world obsessed with perception: how the mind filters reality, how science and psychology can sharpen attention rather than flatten it. Lewes, close to the Victorian debates around scientific observation and everyday experience, is warning that the true enemy of knowledge isn’t mystery; it’s the routine that turns the astonishing into “just how things are.” That’s why the sentence works: it makes wonder an ethical obligation, not a decorative emotion.